“That’s right.”
“Good. So what are you going to do about the dammed stream, Julie?”
“I guess we’re going to go to war.”
“That is, of course, a possibility.”
“Something occurs to me, though. It seems to me that the Cario and the Hullas could have had this conflict before they became Takers.”
“Absolutely possible,” Ishmael said. “What was it I said the Hullas were before becoming full-time farmers? With your excellent memory, I’m sure you remember.”
“They were hunter-gatherers.”
“Why would hunter-gatherers dam a stream, Julie? They have no crops to irrigate.”
“True, but, just for the sake of argument, let’s say they were farmers.”
“All right. But, as I recall, the Cario were only partly dependent on farming. Losing a stream wouldn’t threaten their way of life.”
“True also,” I said, “but again, just for the sake of the argument, let’s say they were full-time farmers.”
“Very well. Then the Cario are going to engage in some very brutal and very erratic retaliation. In the face of this, the Hullas will have to decide if damming the stream is worthwhile to them.”
“So it’s war in either case,” I told him. “Becoming Takers didn’t make any difference.”
Ishmael shook his head. “A moment ago you said that, speaking for the Cario, you were going to have to ‘go to war’ over the dammed stream. Is ‘going to war’ the same as retaliation?”
“No, I suppose it isn’t.”
“What’s the difference, as you see it?”
“Retaliation is giving as good as you get, going to war is conquering people to make them do what you want.”
“So, even though it’s possible to say that it’s ‘war in either case,’ it’s different kinds of war, with different objectives. The object of retaliation is to show people that you can be nice or nasty, depending on whether they’re nice or nasty. The object of going to war is to conquer them and bend them to your will. Very different things, and erratic retaliation was about the former, not the latter.”
“Yes, I suppose that’s true.”
Ishmael was silent for a moment, then he asked if I saw erratic retaliation at work anywhere among the Takers of today. After thinking about it for a while, I told him I saw it at work in juvenile-gang warfare.
“That’s very astute, Julie. Erratic retaliation is precisely the strategy they employ as a means of maintaining an equal footing among themselves. And what do the people of your culture want to do with juvenile gangs?”
“They want to suppress them, for sure. Do away with them.”
“Naturally,” Ishmael said, nodding. “But there are some other highly visible combatants pursuing a strategy of erratic retaliation right now, aren’t there?”
“Oh,” I said, “yeah, I guess so. You mean all those crazy people in Bosnia.”
“That’s right. And what do the people of your culture want to do with them?
“They want to make them stop fighting.”
“They want to make them stop acting like Erratic Retaliators.”
“Exactly.”
“ ‘Going to war’ is acceptable to you, but erratic retaliation is not, and it never has been. Right from the beginning, the Takers have been unalterably hostile to this tribal strategy. I suspect it’s because erratic retaliation is fundamentally self-controlling and fundamentally unsusceptible to outside management. And Takers don’t trust anything that’s self-controlling. They want to manage it all and can’t stand having anything going on around them that is outside their control.”
“Very true. But are you saying we should leave them alone to fight it out?”